


Accordion Folder

by Loudest_Voice



Series: MCU One-shots [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Asthma, Gen, Hydra (Marvel), Medications, Oneshot, Revenge, The Winter Soldier - Freeform, Unclear Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-18
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-26 23:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5024386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loudest_Voice/pseuds/Loudest_Voice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldiers recovers much faster than is convenient for Hydra.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accordion Folder

The asset remembers little and understands less. He knows only that, as long as he is operational, he will seek out his former masters and eliminate them.

It takes some weeks--he’s withdrawing from too many drugs to know exactly how long--for him to be ready, but then it’s only a matter of focusing on one fleeting memory and losing himself in Hydra facility after Hydra facility. The files wait for him, disorganized, clouded in obfuscating language, but with the names he needs.

The asset starts in Milan. The man he seeks scrubbed the internet clean of him, but he did not think to curtail his mistress’ selfie habit. The girl--decades younger than the asset’s target--has posted pictures of every room in the target’s mansion.

The man does not look like the asset expects. Years have loosened the skin of his face, atrophied the width of his muscles, and weakened the tenor of his voice. The asset remembers _don’t move--sonofabitch_ and a revolver striking his forehead as hands buckle him to a chair. _Please, please, that was another life_ with tears and snot make him stumble, but not so much that he misses the mistress coming in with a shotgun.

The asset bashes the man’s skull with his left arm, dislocates the mistress’ shoulder and makes her choke on her shrill scream and snaps her neck.

He considers that some of the servants might be innocent, then mentally shrugs. Collateral damage.

His mind is clear for four days before he zeroes in on another memory: a woman this time, her green eyes glinting behind round glasses as she runs a gloved hand over the scar tissue where his arm is grafted onto his chest.

It’s harder to find her. The asset has to rely on desperate ramblings from several terrified targets before he catches her in Moscow, hidden among the members of a bingo club. He’s prepared for the insults that time inflicted on his target’s face this time, and kills her before she has a chance to beg.

In between mission, the asset reads as much as possible. It’s insultingly easy to find information on The Captain. Doesn’t the man have an iota of self-preservation? The asses could have killed him a hundred times over . . . but he doesn’t.

He doesn’t, and the failure should bother him more than it does.

The internet, an encyclopedia of endless information (though difficult to verify) that he can access from any cranny he desires, draws him into a false sense of security. He’s reading about how The Captain’s image was used during the Vietnam to shame draft dodgers (and boy, would have Steve hated that war) when a Hydra operative manages to sneak behind him.

The asset just barely manages to crush the wrist before the needle finds his jugular. Hydra doesn’t flinch, strikes with a dagger at the asset’s other side. The asset throws his body backwards, crushes Hydra against the wall, and kicks at the one coming at his front.

Six of them invade the asset's cramped motel room. The asset keeps one of them alive until he bleats the location of the Hydra base that concocted the plan to bring him back in for recalibration.

The asset sends a message. That Hydra base goes down slowly, with none of the methodical precision the asset normally takes pride in. This time, it’s about decimation. He lets several Hydra members go with nothing but a few mangled joints so they can tell any other stragglers what will happen to them if they dare go after the Winter Soldier.

Before he burns the base to ashes, he finds a manila folder of the type that opens up like an accordion. The asset doesn’t remember any of the names in it, but he can recognize James Barnes’ face easily enough by now.

It’s better that he doesn’t have jumbled memories to make him stumble.

The asset eliminates four targets on the folder--an oil magnate who bankrolled the assassination of an engineer on the cusp of a solar energy breakthrough, a cartel boss who hired out the asset to whittle away at a competitor’s operation, a corrupt politician who needed a civil rights lawyer murdered, and a retired artist who rented out Captain America’s dead best friend to fulfill some mundane sexual fantasies--when he runs into a target that grinds him to a screeching halt.

The target it a middle-aged smoker dying of some kind of chronic lung disease. Seeing the asset sinks him into a panic and shortens his breath. Instead of begging, he reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a white tube and brings it to his mouth. The asset watches him take deep breath after deep breath, watery brown eyes wide and fixed on the metal arm.

The motions are familiar to the asset, as familiar as the scent of antiseptic and the feel of it drying on his exposed skin. The target inhales deeply, and easily enough, then has to push out the air out his nose with his whole body, chest leaning forward and lips pursed tightly over the little tube’s nozzle. After several inhalations, the target exhales become shorter and less labored, closer to what the breathing of a healthy man looks like. The asset watches for a few more breaths, then walks forward and bashes the target’s head with his left arm.

The asset grabs the tube before the man crumbles to the floor, transparent fluid and blood leaking from his nostril. Ignoring the target, the asset examines the tube. He pulls out the medicine bottle inside it as he sits on the motel bed and grabs that week’s stolen phone in his pocket.

It’s an embarrassment that it took the asset so long to google ‘asthma’, and that he only did it because a target was taking a medication labeled ‘salbutamol’. He spends several hours in the target’s motel room, the target’s corpse cooling on the floor, reading about the disease that wrapped its fist around Steve’s throat and kept him from becoming the man he dreamed. When his eyes scan the absurd prices of the miracle drugs, the asset’s eyes almost bulge out his skull.

Then he remembers that The Captain doesn’t have asthma anymore and sighs. He still pocket’s the target’s medication, fingers running over the nuzzle. He’ll have to clean Hydra slobber off it later.

In the meantime, he still has several files left on the accordion folder.

**Author's Note:**

> Liked the story? My ramblings and original fiction can be found at [my blog](http://dynamicallyopposed.blogspot.com/) .


End file.
